10,750 research outputs found
The Argument Reasoning Comprehension Task: Identification and Reconstruction of Implicit Warrants
Reasoning is a crucial part of natural language argumentation. To comprehend
an argument, one must analyze its warrant, which explains why its claim follows
from its premises. As arguments are highly contextualized, warrants are usually
presupposed and left implicit. Thus, the comprehension does not only require
language understanding and logic skills, but also depends on common sense. In
this paper we develop a methodology for reconstructing warrants systematically.
We operationalize it in a scalable crowdsourcing process, resulting in a freely
licensed dataset with warrants for 2k authentic arguments from news comments.
On this basis, we present a new challenging task, the argument reasoning
comprehension task. Given an argument with a claim and a premise, the goal is
to choose the correct implicit warrant from two options. Both warrants are
plausible and lexically close, but lead to contradicting claims. A solution to
this task will define a substantial step towards automatic warrant
reconstruction. However, experiments with several neural attention and language
models reveal that current approaches do not suffice.Comment: Accepted as NAACL 2018 Long Paper; see details on the front pag
Fitting Tractable Convex Sets to Support Function Evaluations
The geometric problem of estimating an unknown compact convex set from
evaluations of its support function arises in a range of scientific and
engineering applications. Traditional approaches typically rely on estimators
that minimize the error over all possible compact convex sets; in particular,
these methods do not allow for the incorporation of prior structural
information about the underlying set and the resulting estimates become
increasingly more complicated to describe as the number of measurements
available grows. We address both of these shortcomings by describing a
framework for estimating tractably specified convex sets from support function
evaluations. Building on the literature in convex optimization, our approach is
based on estimators that minimize the error over structured families of convex
sets that are specified as linear images of concisely described sets -- such as
the simplex or the spectraplex -- in a higher-dimensional space that is not
much larger than the ambient space. Convex sets parametrized in this manner are
significant from a computational perspective as one can optimize linear
functionals over such sets efficiently; they serve a different purpose in the
inferential context of the present paper, namely, that of incorporating
regularization in the reconstruction while still offering considerable
expressive power. We provide a geometric characterization of the asymptotic
behavior of our estimators, and our analysis relies on the property that
certain sets which admit semialgebraic descriptions are Vapnik-Chervonenkis
(VC) classes. Our numerical experiments highlight the utility of our framework
over previous approaches in settings in which the measurements available are
noisy or small in number as well as those in which the underlying set to be
reconstructed is non-polyhedral.Comment: 35 pages, 80 figure
DUDE-Seq: Fast, Flexible, and Robust Denoising for Targeted Amplicon Sequencing
We consider the correction of errors from nucleotide sequences produced by
next-generation targeted amplicon sequencing. The next-generation sequencing
(NGS) platforms can provide a great deal of sequencing data thanks to their
high throughput, but the associated error rates often tend to be high.
Denoising in high-throughput sequencing has thus become a crucial process for
boosting the reliability of downstream analyses. Our methodology, named
DUDE-Seq, is derived from a general setting of reconstructing finite-valued
source data corrupted by a discrete memoryless channel and effectively corrects
substitution and homopolymer indel errors, the two major types of sequencing
errors in most high-throughput targeted amplicon sequencing platforms. Our
experimental studies with real and simulated datasets suggest that the proposed
DUDE-Seq not only outperforms existing alternatives in terms of
error-correction capability and time efficiency, but also boosts the
reliability of downstream analyses. Further, the flexibility of DUDE-Seq
enables its robust application to different sequencing platforms and analysis
pipelines by simple updates of the noise model. DUDE-Seq is available at
http://data.snu.ac.kr/pub/dude-seq
Reconstructing large-scale structure with neutral hydrogen surveys
Upcoming 21-cm intensity surveys will use the hyperfine transition in emission to map out neutral hydrogen in large volumes of the universe. Unfortunately, large spatial scales are completely contaminated with spectrally smooth astrophysical foregrounds which are orders of magnitude brighter than the signal. This contamination also leaks into smaller radial and angular modes to form a foreground wedge, further limiting the usefulness of 21-cm observations for different science cases, especially cross-correlations with tracers that have wide kernels in the radial direction. In this paper, we investigate reconstructing these modes within a forward modeling framework. Starting with an initial density field, a suitable bias parameterization and non-linear dynamics to model the observed 21-cm field, our reconstruction proceeds by {combining} the likelihood of a forward simulation to match the observations (under given modeling error and a data noise model) {with the Gaussian prior on initial conditions and maximizing the obtained posterior}. For redshifts z=2 and 4, we are able to reconstruct 21cm field with cross correlation, rc > 0.8 on all scales for both our optimistic and pessimistic assumptions about foreground contamination and for different levels of thermal noise. The performance deteriorates slightly at z=6. The large-scale line-of-sight modes are reconstructed almost perfectly. We demonstrate how our method also provides a technique for density field reconstruction for baryon acoustic oscillations, outperforming standard methods on all scales. We also describe how our reconstructed field can provide superb clustering redshift estimation at high redshifts, where it is otherwise extremely difficult to obtain dense spectroscopic samples, as well as open up a wealth of cross-correlation opportunities with projected fields (e.g. lensing) which are restricted to modes transverse to the line of sight
Non-convex image reconstruction via Expectation Propagation
Tomographic image reconstruction can be mapped to a problem of finding
solutions to a large system of linear equations which maximize a function that
includes \textit{a priori} knowledge regarding features of typical images such
as smoothness or sharpness. This maximization can be performed with standard
local optimization tools when the function is concave, but it is generally
intractable for realistic priors, which are non-concave. We introduce a new
method to reconstruct images obtained from Radon projections by using
Expectation Propagation, which allows us to reframe the problem from an
Bayesian inference perspective. We show, by means of extensive simulations,
that, compared to state-of-the-art algorithms for this task, Expectation
Propagation paired with very simple but non log-concave priors, is often able
to reconstruct images up to a smaller error while using a lower amount of
information per pixel. We provide estimates for the critical rate of
information per pixel above which recovery is error-free by means of
simulations on ensembles of phantom and real images.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figure
Phase retrieval for characteristic functions of convex bodies and reconstruction from covariograms
We propose strongly consistent algorithms for reconstructing the
characteristic function 1_K of an unknown convex body K in R^n from possibly
noisy measurements of the modulus of its Fourier transform \hat{1_K}. This
represents a complete theoretical solution to the Phase Retrieval Problem for
characteristic functions of convex bodies. The approach is via the closely
related problem of reconstructing K from noisy measurements of its covariogram,
the function giving the volume of the intersection of K with its translates. In
the many known situations in which the covariogram determines a convex body, up
to reflection in the origin and when the position of the body is fixed, our
algorithms use O(k^n) noisy covariogram measurements to construct a convex
polytope P_k that approximates K or its reflection -K in the origin. (By recent
uniqueness results, this applies to all planar convex bodies, all
three-dimensional convex polytopes, and all symmetric and most (in the sense of
Baire category) arbitrary convex bodies in all dimensions.) Two methods are
provided, and both are shown to be strongly consistent, in the sense that,
almost surely, the minimum of the Hausdorff distance between P_k and K or -K
tends to zero as k tends to infinity.Comment: Version accepted on the Journal of the American Mathematical Society.
With respect to version 1 the noise model has been greatly extended and an
appendix has been added, with a discussion of rates of convergence and
implementation issues. 56 pages, 4 figure
Optomechanical state reconstruction and nonclassicality verification beyond the resolved-sideband regime
Quantum optomechanics uses optical means to generate and manipulate quantum
states of motion of mechanical resonators. This provides an intriguing platform
for the study of fundamental physics and the development of novel quantum
devices. Yet, the challenge of reconstructing and verifying the quantum state
of mechanical systems has remained a major roadblock in the field. Here, we
present a novel approach that allows for tomographic reconstruction of the
quantum state of a mechanical system without the need for extremely high
quality optical cavities. We show that, without relying on the usual state
transfer presumption between light an mechanics, the full optomechanical
Hamiltonian can be exploited to imprint mechanical tomograms on a strong
optical coherent pulse, which can then be read out using well-established
techniques. Furthermore, with only a small number of measurements, our method
can be used to witness nonclassical features of mechanical systems without
requiring full tomography. By relaxing the experimental requirements, our
technique thus opens a feasible route towards verifying the quantum state of
mechanical resonators and their nonclassical behaviour in a wide range of
optomechanical systems.Comment: 12 pages + 9 pages of appendices, 4 figure
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